Artificial Intelligence

Bite-back occurs when an innovation has unexpected and unintended effects. It is probably the case that in most cases such consequences are negative, but that is not invariably the case. Bite-back happens because a new technology is by definition an exploration into the unknown, and so it is impossible to predict precisely whether it will do more or less of just very different things from what it was meant to do.

“You can do some pretty impressive things with AI as a technological platform, but I am not necessarily an optimist because there are also some very negative paths that AI could take as a technology. We have a confluence of factors that make the negative use of this technology much more probable than positive use”, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu argues.